If the US attracts American workers to STEM fields by paying higher salaries, the net effect will be fewer of those jobs, as companies move jobs overseas where the salaries are lower.
Assuming that the exchange value of the US dollar remains constant. You've written the standard "you've got to work cheaper to be globally competitive" line. Even if it's true, that doesn't mean US salaries should go down, it means that the exchange rate for the USD should go down. We have a persistent trade deficit, and the only reason it's not as bad as a few years ago is that the economy is in the toilet. A lower exchange value for the dollar would fix the trade deficit.
Oops, that approach might mean that the plutocrats' incomes might not increase as fast relative to the middle class. The finance industry in particular just loves the "strong" (i.e. uncompetitive) dollar. Look at the origin of our strong dollar policy w/ Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the 90's. You know Bobby, the guy who returned to Wall Street and made a fortune helping to drive Citibank into the ground.
this definition (that more resources allocated to STEM would be better) is a fine definition for a shortage
The Humpty Dumpty school of economics. If you can't figure out how to refute the study that says there is no shortage, then just change the definition of "shortage"!
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
-- "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871), Lewis Carroll
A company will always try to hire the best and the brightest at the lowest cost. And if that means foreign workers then so be it.We are all part of global economy
So we're now all part of the global economy, huh? Then we should definitely allow STEM guest workers, just as soon as we start doing it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., eliminate sugar, ethanol, orange juice and other agricultural tariffs, and get rid of things like region coding and nabbing the elderly for buying their prescriptions in that third world hellhole of unsafe pharmaceuticals called "Canada".
if you want to compete, you better raise your game
So you're prepared to take a pay cut to be more competitive with your Indian counterparts? How noble of you.
There was a time when the US workers were a leader in the engineering and sciences.
There was also a time when there was a good economic incentive to become educated and work in STEM fields.
Why would any successful CEO want to "help" fat lazy welfare moms who refuse to work hard when they can instead take that profit and send it to places where people still work hard for a living, places like china and india.
Why would an intelligent shareholder be willing to pay an American CEO 400x as much as an average worker, when in the rest of the world (include Europe, Canada and Japan) they "only" earn 10x-20x as much?
how is Apple taking all of the mountains of money they earn and putting it into there massive bank account better than them paying a part of their money out to there shareholders as a dividend?
Not only is it not better, it's not even legal. There are limits to how much cash a company can keep on hand before it has to declare it as profit and pay taxes on it. Unfortunately, nobody enforces those silly tax laws anymore if your company is worth at least X billion dollars.
Splitting the difference is often not the best way to arrive at the most accurate answer. If person A said 2+2=4 but person B said 2+2=5, would you split the difference? The answer is to look at the objective data. This study is but the latest one arriving at the conclusion that there is no STEM shortage. Where is a study from the pro-H-1B side that uses objective data to determine that there is a STEM shortage? Please cite if you know of any, but frankly I'm only interested in things that use objective data (DoL statistics, compensation, unemployment, etc.). The only pro-H-1B stuff I've ever read is tech billionaires and their sycophants saying "yeah, there's a shortage, trust us".
How do you know *for sure* I'm missing the point, and the program is *absolutely unnecessary* ?
For sure? The only things I'm for sure about are death and taxes. And what does "absolutely unnecessary" mean, that there's not one conceivable positive point about it? I never claimed that either, only that on balance it's undesirable, and the justifications for it are weak and don't have objective support. My argument for it being unnecessary, other than the objective data cited in this and other studies, is that for decades the US was the world's science and technology leader despite the fact that no one had even heard of the H-1B.
Because if it worked as it was originally intended, allowing hiring of candidates with truly rare skills as and when they are needed from wherever in the world those candidates might be found
Before the H-1B there was no problem getting visas for people with truly rare skills. There is a whole alphabet soup of visa categories, like the 'O' series for truly exceptional people.
The other issue is maybe many, if not most, of these students actually do not know anything.
The average H-1B knows so much more? Many of them are grads (often new grads) from the same US universities that the Americans went to. And if anything, many foreign universities, even academically prestigious ones, seem to be less practically oriented than American schools.
IT hiring in the US is very focused on a few hotspots. Foreign workers seeking employment here of course expect to move to where the jobs are, but US graduates often only look locally.
So everybody should move to Silicon Valley? Might get a little crowded. Amongst the reasons many people are reluctant to move there is the absurd price of real estate. If having more people in SV is so important, why not change the zoning regulations so that the place can become an urban instead of a suburban area?
Even if that does work accord to theory, it says nothing about distribution of income. One of the big failings of mainstream economic theory is that it endlessly addresses aggregate income, but says amazingly little about its distribution. If we doubled our GDP but redistributed it such that 99% of it went to the top 1%, would we have a "better economy"?
It's interesting that this lack of attention to distribution completely ignores one of the key principles of economics: diminishing marginal utility. An extra dollar is worth more to me than Zuckerberg, and an extra dollar is worth more to a minimum wage worker than to me.
Note to any trolls who may start screaming "commie": I'm not saying that everybody should earn the same income, or that nobody should be rich, or any other such straw men. I am saying that looking at GDP without looking at distribution is idiotic, and violates a prime tenet of both economics and common sense. In past decades (e.g. 1940's-1970's) we had a far less extreme income distribution and had faster economic growth than we do now. Not necessarily cause and effect (though there are some good arguments there) but it certainly demonstrates that extreme disparities aren't necessary for growth.
Do you have a point? Perhaps you could even explain why you think the OP's point is wrong, or what your alternative explanation is. For a really tough assignment, find some objective evidence that says there really is a STEM shortage. Hint: tech billionaires saying "trust us, there's a shortage" is not objective evidence.
Ever hear the words 'hit the ground running'? That is why the demand for h1b is so high. They want people who do the job with 0 training.
Nonsense. Many H-1B's are recent grads. Your points about no training (for Americans) are dead on though. In many cases it isn't even formal training, but accepting that your new hire may take a month or two to get up to speed with the exact tools you're using.
USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that all, or even most, of the STEM people we "took" from those places are the best and the brightest. Nobody in the US opposes having the "best and the brightest" come here, but the vast majority are simply of average ability and recruited to reduce pay of people in the US.
I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States.
No problem. I think we should do that for STEM people as soon as we start doing it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., eliminate sugar, ethanol, orange juice and other agricultural tariffs, and get rid of things like region coding and nabbing the elderly for buying their prescriptions in that third world hellhole of unsafe pharmaceuticals called "Canada".
The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries.
How do we "loose the STEM war"? Since the study makes clear (as have other studies, many done much earlier) that there is no shortage of STEM people in the US, the purpose of massive guest worker programs (e.g. H-1B) is to reduce the pay of people in the US. This has nothing to do with how "globally competitive" the US is, and everything to do with how the pie gets divided up here. The plutocracy doesn't like this whole "middle class" thing where many Americans make a decent living.
Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage.
No, it isn't. The OP never said that roads were, or even should be, a private good. "Public good" and "private good" have precise definitions according to economists, and they are not the only two categories. Which is why I said that merely citing the definition of "public good" is not an argument.
Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?
No, it never crossed my mind. And apparently the whole idea of "sarcasm" is unfamiliar to your mind. Next time I'll spell things out literally for the sake of those who have no understanding of non-literal statements.
And a comment that includes ad hominems like "do you have half a brain" gets modded to +4 insightful while mere sarcasm gets modded down to 0? Some of the moderators are incredibly biased and/or just as incapable of grapsing non-literal expression.
No, he didn't. All he did was state why roads do not fall within an economists definition of "public goods", not why that matters. Roads don't fall within the definition of fruit trees either. So?
And yes, I'm practicing what might pretentiously be called "Socratic obtuseness" (by analogy to the Socratic method). Presumably the OP was implying that only "public goods" should be provided by the government. Yet many things which government normally provides are not public goods: parks, libraries, police and fire protection, etc.
There isn't an infinite demand for roads, there's a finite number of people trying to get to a finite number of places and if the roads are sufficient then you don't have congestion. Driving is not a free activity, it costs money even if the road doesn't.
Japan is an example of that, they've gone road building crazy trying to make growth and where they've done that, the roads are empty. Just not enough traffic.
Variable pricing does not fix capacity, it rewards incompetence. If the authority is too incompetent to deliver the road service, it earns the most money from congestion charges. Thus the incentive is to be incompetent and fail to deliver proper road infrastructure.
Quoting the whole post because it's too good to languish at score 0.
I see that you understand the concept of a "definition". Excellent. In rhetoric the next step is to take the term so defined and to use it as part of a logical argument. For example you could write "Because roads are not a public good...". Try it.
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If the US attracts American workers to STEM fields by paying higher salaries, the net effect will be fewer of those jobs, as companies move jobs overseas where the salaries are lower.
Assuming that the exchange value of the US dollar remains constant. You've written the standard "you've got to work cheaper to be globally competitive" line. Even if it's true, that doesn't mean US salaries should go down, it means that the exchange rate for the USD should go down. We have a persistent trade deficit, and the only reason it's not as bad as a few years ago is that the economy is in the toilet. A lower exchange value for the dollar would fix the trade deficit.
Oops, that approach might mean that the plutocrats' incomes might not increase as fast relative to the middle class. The finance industry in particular just loves the "strong" (i.e. uncompetitive) dollar. Look at the origin of our strong dollar policy w/ Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the 90's. You know Bobby, the guy who returned to Wall Street and made a fortune helping to drive Citibank into the ground.
I'd love to add something, but you've described the issue so accurately and succinctly that I can't think of anything.
this definition (that more resources allocated to STEM would be better) is a fine definition for a shortage
The Humpty Dumpty school of economics. If you can't figure out how to refute the study that says there is no shortage, then just change the definition of "shortage"!
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
-- "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871), Lewis Carroll
A company will always try to hire the best and the brightest at the lowest cost. And if that means foreign workers then so be it.We are all part of global economy
So we're now all part of the global economy, huh? Then we should definitely allow STEM guest workers, just as soon as we start doing it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., eliminate sugar, ethanol, orange juice and other agricultural tariffs, and get rid of things like region coding and nabbing the elderly for buying their prescriptions in that third world hellhole of unsafe pharmaceuticals called "Canada".
if you want to compete, you better raise your game
So you're prepared to take a pay cut to be more competitive with your Indian counterparts? How noble of you.
There was a time when the US workers were a leader in the engineering and sciences.
There was also a time when there was a good economic incentive to become educated and work in STEM fields.
Why would any successful CEO want to "help" fat lazy welfare moms who refuse to work hard when they can instead take that profit and send it to places where people still work hard for a living, places like china and india.
Why would an intelligent shareholder be willing to pay an American CEO 400x as much as an average worker, when in the rest of the world (include Europe, Canada and Japan) they "only" earn 10x-20x as much?
how is Apple taking all of the mountains of money they earn and putting it into there massive bank account better than them paying a part of their money out to there shareholders as a dividend?
Not only is it not better, it's not even legal. There are limits to how much cash a company can keep on hand before it has to declare it as profit and pay taxes on it. Unfortunately, nobody enforces those silly tax laws anymore if your company is worth at least X billion dollars.
But the shortage of *qualified, employable* STEM is very very real.
Do you have an argument for that assertion, or even *gasp* objective data?
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Splitting the difference is often not the best way to arrive at the most accurate answer. If person A said 2+2=4 but person B said 2+2=5, would you split the difference? The answer is to look at the objective data. This study is but the latest one arriving at the conclusion that there is no STEM shortage. Where is a study from the pro-H-1B side that uses objective data to determine that there is a STEM shortage? Please cite if you know of any, but frankly I'm only interested in things that use objective data (DoL statistics, compensation, unemployment, etc.). The only pro-H-1B stuff I've ever read is tech billionaires and their sycophants saying "yeah, there's a shortage, trust us".
How do you know *for sure* I'm missing the point, and the program is *absolutely unnecessary* ?
For sure? The only things I'm for sure about are death and taxes. And what does "absolutely unnecessary" mean, that there's not one conceivable positive point about it? I never claimed that either, only that on balance it's undesirable, and the justifications for it are weak and don't have objective support. My argument for it being unnecessary, other than the objective data cited in this and other studies, is that for decades the US was the world's science and technology leader despite the fact that no one had even heard of the H-1B.
Because if it worked as it was originally intended, allowing hiring of candidates with truly rare skills as and when they are needed from wherever in the world those candidates might be found
Before the H-1B there was no problem getting visas for people with truly rare skills. There is a whole alphabet soup of visa categories, like the 'O' series for truly exceptional people.
The only way this is a conspiracy is if they somehow were contemplating committing a crime.
No, that's the way criminal lawyers define it for their purposes. In plain English the definition is much broader.
I say give them the H1B workers. Those companies will be worse off because of it.
Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.
The other issue is maybe many, if not most, of these students actually do not know anything.
The average H-1B knows so much more? Many of them are grads (often new grads) from the same US universities that the Americans went to. And if anything, many foreign universities, even academically prestigious ones, seem to be less practically oriented than American schools.
IT hiring in the US is very focused on a few hotspots. Foreign workers seeking employment here of course expect to move to where the jobs are, but US graduates often only look locally.
So everybody should move to Silicon Valley? Might get a little crowded. Amongst the reasons many people are reluctant to move there is the absurd price of real estate. If having more people in SV is so important, why not change the zoning regulations so that the place can become an urban instead of a suburban area?
Maybe the shortage is real, but only for high-IQ people?
How high is high? We could always use more Nobel prize winners.
It's worked out well for the Commonwealth nations
It worked well for the Commonwealth countries because there was little opportunity for labor arbitrage.
Even if that does work accord to theory, it says nothing about distribution of income. One of the big failings of mainstream economic theory is that it endlessly addresses aggregate income, but says amazingly little about its distribution. If we doubled our GDP but redistributed it such that 99% of it went to the top 1%, would we have a "better economy"?
It's interesting that this lack of attention to distribution completely ignores one of the key principles of economics: diminishing marginal utility. An extra dollar is worth more to me than Zuckerberg, and an extra dollar is worth more to a minimum wage worker than to me.
Note to any trolls who may start screaming "commie": I'm not saying that everybody should earn the same income, or that nobody should be rich, or any other such straw men. I am saying that looking at GDP without looking at distribution is idiotic, and violates a prime tenet of both economics and common sense. In past decades (e.g. 1940's-1970's) we had a far less extreme income distribution and had faster economic growth than we do now. Not necessarily cause and effect (though there are some good arguments there) but it certainly demonstrates that extreme disparities aren't necessary for growth.
Did they do it from the grassy knoll?
Do you have a point? Perhaps you could even explain why you think the OP's point is wrong, or what your alternative explanation is. For a really tough assignment, find some objective evidence that says there really is a STEM shortage. Hint: tech billionaires saying "trust us, there's a shortage" is not objective evidence.
Ever hear the words 'hit the ground running'? That is why the demand for h1b is so high. They want people who do the job with 0 training.
Nonsense. Many H-1B's are recent grads. Your points about no training (for Americans) are dead on though. In many cases it isn't even formal training, but accepting that your new hire may take a month or two to get up to speed with the exact tools you're using.
desperate engineers they can lock into five or ten years of indentured servitude
That's a ridiculous exaggeration. It's only three to six years.
Allow an H1B visa holder to change jobs freely within the 6-year timeframe of their visa.
You're missing the point: why do we need the program at all? Why fix something that isn't even necessary in the first place?
USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that all, or even most, of the STEM people we "took" from those places are the best and the brightest. Nobody in the US opposes having the "best and the brightest" come here, but the vast majority are simply of average ability and recruited to reduce pay of people in the US.
I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States.
No problem. I think we should do that for STEM people as soon as we start doing it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., eliminate sugar, ethanol, orange juice and other agricultural tariffs, and get rid of things like region coding and nabbing the elderly for buying their prescriptions in that third world hellhole of unsafe pharmaceuticals called "Canada".
The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries.
How do we "loose the STEM war"? Since the study makes clear (as have other studies, many done much earlier) that there is no shortage of STEM people in the US, the purpose of massive guest worker programs (e.g. H-1B) is to reduce the pay of people in the US. This has nothing to do with how "globally competitive" the US is, and everything to do with how the pie gets divided up here. The plutocracy doesn't like this whole "middle class" thing where many Americans make a decent living.
Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage.
No, it isn't. The OP never said that roads were, or even should be, a private good. "Public good" and "private good" have precise definitions according to economists, and they are not the only two categories. Which is why I said that merely citing the definition of "public good" is not an argument.
Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?
No, it never crossed my mind. And apparently the whole idea of "sarcasm" is unfamiliar to your mind. Next time I'll spell things out literally for the sake of those who have no understanding of non-literal statements.
And a comment that includes ad hominems like "do you have half a brain" gets modded to +4 insightful while mere sarcasm gets modded down to 0? Some of the moderators are incredibly biased and/or just as incapable of grapsing non-literal expression.
He did. Read the last sentence.
No, he didn't. All he did was state why roads do not fall within an economists definition of "public goods", not why that matters. Roads don't fall within the definition of fruit trees either. So?
And yes, I'm practicing what might pretentiously be called "Socratic obtuseness" (by analogy to the Socratic method). Presumably the OP was implying that only "public goods" should be provided by the government. Yet many things which government normally provides are not public goods: parks, libraries, police and fire protection, etc.
There isn't an infinite demand for roads, there's a finite number of people trying to get to a finite number of places and if the roads are sufficient then you don't have congestion. Driving is not a free activity, it costs money even if the road doesn't.
Japan is an example of that, they've gone road building crazy trying to make growth and where they've done that, the roads are empty. Just not enough traffic.
Variable pricing does not fix capacity, it rewards incompetence. If the authority is too incompetent to deliver the road service, it earns the most money from congestion charges. Thus the incentive is to be incompetent and fail to deliver proper road infrastructure.
Quoting the whole post because it's too good to languish at score 0.
I see that you understand the concept of a "definition". Excellent. In rhetoric the next step is to take the term so defined and to use it as part of a logical argument. For example you could write "Because roads are not a public good ...". Try it.